2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

A RTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AS A NON- PHILOSOPHICAL PROJECT
ological approach and resorted to “armchair speculations” that doomed its efforts and kept
the “mind” wrapped in a web of mysteries for two thousands years.
Conversely, philosophers have built a bridge between the contents of the two investi-
gations in terms of one fundamental intuition which would allegedly cross over from West-
ern philosophy into Artificial Intelligence. According to John Haugeland, for example,
contemporary computational inquiries into the realm of mental phenomena are guided by
one basic insight: the basic mental operation is the manipulation of symbols regardless of
their meanings. It so happens that what digital computers do best is precisely to manipulate
symbols in any specifiable manner whatever. As a consequence, artificial intelligence is in-
volved with computers, and technology at large, almost in spite of itself. As he puts it, “con-
temporary computer technology is relevant only for economic reasons: electronic circuits
just happen to be (at the moment) the cheapest way to build flexible symbol manipulating
systems.” 45 Artificial Intelligence is then deemed to be a science, in the narrow, strict mean-
ing of the term, (e.g. not in the sense of Wissenschaft I used in the previous chapter): a sci-
ence of the mind, or of the “mental.”
This interpretation is extremely interesting because, in spite of the big gap it strives to
open between “idle philosophizing” and “serious scientific investigations,” it actually
brings past philosophy and modern science so close that they almost coincide in scope. In
fact, it is easy to see that the core of the dispute is about the methods used, whereas the sub-
ject matter drifts essentially untouched from the Greek dawn of Western thought to present-
day cognitive psychology. The thesis on the relationship between AI and philosophy can
thus be rephrased, in a slightly more technical form, as follows: the content of the two in-
vestigations is considered essentially similar (if not identical), whereas the form is deemed
radically different (empirical vs. a-priori). In short, the “classical interpretation” of AI,
which I have explored in the previous section, can be summed up by saying that Engineer-
45. John Haugeland, Artificial Intelligence. The Very Idea (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985) 5. The claim
that computers are, essentially, symbol manipulators has not gone unchallenged. The most sustained
attack against this thesis (which is crucial to the understanding of AI as a science just outlined) has
been mounted by Brian Cantwell Smith, The Age of Significance (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming
1998). I will not discuss this here, since my thesis about AI as non-philosophy is largely independent
of it.
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